NewryUns

NewryUns Hello Ü new NewryÜns inside ü, family , tribe, townland ,anystate, a nüw newry city Yarn, . a pipe bomb and my stupid curiosity on all things newry ..

About NewryUns.com

Wuth a background in image media , With over 25 Years expertise , NewRayPics Image Agency and our award winning team of photographers, specialising in PR., Features, News and Sports photography, was based in Newry, County Down, Northern Ireland. Newraypics experienced photographers have been awarded two numerous 1st & 2nd place awards in the highly regarded NIPP

A Northern Ireland Press Photographers Association) as well as Photojournalism Awards in 2008/9, and 2011 plus a commendation in 2009. We regularly undertake assignments from the Broadsheet and Tabloid market including The Guardian, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, The Sun, The Irish Examiner, Belfast Telegraph, The Irish News, The Newsletter, Irish Independent and Irish Times as well as features work for Periodic Magazines across the United Kingdom and Ireland additional to that we have a working relationship with local Press including The Newry Democrat,The Cross Examiner, Newry Reporter and Mourne Observer - more recently we have been suppling one of the largest photo agency's in the world - Alamy -

To a degree or soo . Newraypics overtime had the honor to also supply all Irish newspapers with live news events and our work has appeared in publications all over the world, Our archive (currently 400,000 images) is represented by some of the world's largest stock photography agencies - namely Getty Images, Zuma Press and Alamy Images. My photography has been licensed/commissioned by the following Corporations, Publications and Newswires: The Irish Examiner, The Irish Times, Sunday Business Post, Sunday Times,Red Bull, Bank of Ireland,Ulster Bank, RTE, BBC, UTV, Channel 4,CNN, The Guardian (UK),, The Times (UK), The Independent (UK)The Telegraph (UK). LA Times, New York Daily News and Daily Mail, and my work has been reproduced all over the world including Japan, South America, USA, Russia. I also have over 1,000 (that's correct one thousand) Pearson Publishing book covers that have been created with my images. I live 3kms outside Newry, County Down with my 4 chickens - distance no object! I am a fully insured, and have close links with the National Union of Journalists and the with Irish Press Photographers Association…

Once upon a time after I’d sampled all all of the above .. slowly I lost faith in myself and my natives .. how had I who sees everything .. not see the sorrow I was in … Due to a few forks in my life .. I lost my way . I shuttered up , I went to my safe place .. a dark room .. . , over time my batteries failed my camera old wore out , and me Getting 🤧 unhealthy was an added bonus ., sure I hadn’t two legs to stand on for the guts of a year . These and alas more ,,, Pausing my talented eye , lost and alone . and Sure I spent half the weeks daylight hours in a dark room printings as a young man .. where I was alone .. I think I always did .. ... anyhow .,. My photography yarn .. it’s starts when I was very young

But that’s for later exposure .. …..

Wee yarn .. fungi at dusk
09/09/2026

Wee yarn .. fungi at dusk

Wee yarn ..
09/09/2026

Wee yarn ..

WEE YARN… THE GREEN GILLS BENEATH THE HONEY FUNGUS. 🍄🌳 Quare change in the Evenings .. At first glance, this looks li...
09/09/2026

WEE YARN… THE GREEN GILLS BENEATH THE HONEY FUNGUS. 🍄🌳
Quare change in the Evenings ..

At first glance, this looks like a gathering of ordinary golden mushrooms growing from an old piece of timber.

But get down beneath them—with the camera almost touching the ground—and an entirely different little woodland world appears.

To help reveal the extraordinary structure beneath the caps, I illuminated the fungi using a UV light. The added light picked out every delicate gill, fold & fibre, giving the undersides their vivid green appearance against the darkness of the surrounding trees.

The green in these photographs is therefore an artistic lighting effect created with the UV lamp. It should not be mistaken for proof that the mushrooms themselves were naturally glowing.

Honey fungus is the collective name given to several related species of Armillaria. The mushrooms we see are only the temporary fruiting bodies. Most of the organism remains hidden within the timber & surrounding soil as a network of microscopic threads called mycelium.

It can:

• break down dead stumps & buried roots
• spread through connected root systems
• survive underground for many years
• produce dark, bootlace-like cords called rhizomorphs
• sometimes infect weakened or living trees

Certain Armillaria species can produce genuine natural bioluminescence—but it is generally the living mycelium inside infected or decaying wood that creates the faint green light, rather than these great golden caps shining like lamps, but a little camera mastery & I can reveal all .

That natural phenomenon became known as “foxfire” or “fairy fire.”

Imagine long ago good evening okay noencountering faintly glowing timber in an ancient woodland without streetlights, torches or electricity. It is easy to understand how such sights became associated with fairies, spirits & unseen inhabitants of the woods.

There is no secure historical evidence that the people of ancient Ulster, the druids or the Picts had a special ceremonial use for honey fungus. Fungi rarely survive in the archaeological record, so whatever knowledge or stories once surrounded them may simply have disappeared.

What we can say is that earlier woodland communities would certainly have encountered great colonies like this—golden caps emerging from dead timber, breaking down the remains of an old tree & returning its substance to the living woodland.

Ancient magic perhaps… but natural magic all the same.

Please do not eat wild fungi on the strength of a photograph. Identification can be difficult & some species or individual reactions can cause illness.

09/09/2026

Wee yarn .. how to photograph honey fungi at dusk.. see last post to reveal the fun guy fungi..

Wee yarn .. being the funguy that i am .. I took max in a stroll around the park in Warrenpoint.. where I noticed an ...
09/09/2026

Wee yarn .. being the funguy that i am .. I took max in a stroll around the park in Warrenpoint.. where I noticed an old tree root with fungus growing .. it’s called honey fungus & holds old fairy tale yarns

09/09/2026

Wee yarn .. a new autumn shop window display at Vincent’s on Mill street ..

WEE YARN… THE OLD BARRED WINDOW OF NEWRY. 🪟☘️. But where ? There are windows built to let people look out…& then there ...
08/09/2026

WEE YARN… THE OLD BARRED WINDOW OF NEWRY. 🪟☘️. But where ?

There are windows built to let people look out…

& then there are windows built to make certain nobody—or nothing—was getting in.

Hidden behind the bushes, brick repairs & generations of Newry weather stands this old granite-framed window, its iron bars still holding their ground long after the roof, floors & working lives around it have disappeared.

The wider ruins reveal that this was once part of a substantial, long rectangular building—probably two storeys high, with a pitched roof & carefully constructed stone gables.

It was no wee roadside shed thrown together after dinner.

The walls were built from roughly coursed local rubble stone, while the builders saved their finest dressed granite for the corners & window openings. Several high-level barred windows appear to have been included in the original design, providing light & ventilation while keeping whatever was stored inside safely secured.

That suggests a store, warehouse, mill-related building, creamery outbuilding or some similar commercial structure. Sitting beside Newry’s Old Creamery area on Monaghan Street certainly makes that possibility tempting—although the stones themselves have not yet signed a confession.

The rectangular iron plates visible inside the ruin may once have anchored wooden beams or tied the walls to an upper floor. Different sizes of stone, changing mortar, brick packing & later cement repairs show that the building was altered and patched repeatedly throughout its working life.

My best estimate would place the main structure somewhere between about 1780 & 1850.

The dressed granite window surround was probably part of that original construction, while the iron bars may date from the early or middle nineteenth century. The brick packing, cement pointing & blockwork belong to later chapters—each generation apparently deciding the old building required just one more repair to keep it standing.

The rubble masonry may originally have been covered with lime render or limewash. What we now admire as rugged exposed stonework may never have been intended to face the Newry rain completely naked.

But could something here be older?

Possibly.

The lowest sections of masonry may incorporate an earlier wall or stones reused from another structure. Newry builders were rarely inclined to throw away a perfectly good lump of granite merely because it had already lived one life.

However, there is presently no definite medieval doorway, pointed arch, gun loop, vault or carved surround to prove a medieval origin. The great granite blocks may look ancient, but strong Georgian & early-industrial buildings were also constructed like fortresses—especially when valuable goods were stored inside.

So, for the moment, the most likely yarn is that this was an eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century industrial or commercial building, later altered many times, with the possibility—but not yet the proof—of something older surviving near its foundations.

The real answer may be waiting quietly on an early map.

If this building appears on Newry’s first detailed Ordnance Survey maps of the 1830s, we will know it was standing by then. Older estate maps, leases, valuation books or archaeological investigation might push its story further back.

Until then, the iron bars remain in place…

the bushes have taken possession…

& one old Newry window continues guarding the secrets of a building whose contents vanished long before any of us thought to ask what had been kept inside.

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